Time Management

I really admire my thesis advisor. He seems to have his time management down pat. First of all, I admire him because he spends an hour and a half every day exercising. He makes time for exercise because he understands that it is so important. Second of all, he is really good about answering emails. I can't tell you how many professors are lousy at returning emails (and how frustrating it is). Third of all, not only is he really smart, but also he is a leading member of the field; he spends a lot of time working on current geothermal projects and getting them to go on-line. Fourth of all, he is able to negotiate free software licenses for teaching. Fifth of all, he makes time to talk to his students, both about school-related things and non-school-related things. Sixth of all, he is able to sort through massive amounts of information (from conferences, etc) to pick out the important things. Seventh of all, he is married with kids.

Now, I don't know if he sacrifices some things. Maybe he doesn't get any sleep (but he doesn't ever seem to be tired), or maybe he doesn't have a social life (I don't know). All I know is, he seems to be master of it all. And I want to learn as much from him as I can, because that's the way I aspire to be.

Right now, I would say that I need to improve my time management. It's not BAD by any means, it could just be better in some ways.

Currently, I tend to get most of the "annoying" tasks out of the way first. While this is good because it reduces the amount of items on my to-do list, it's bad in that it causes me to procrastinate on the really important things-- presentations, papers, etc-- that are down the road.

Then once I work on those important things, I have a lot of trouble focusing. Like right now, I'm supposed to be working on Presentation #3 of the week. But the article is so boring and 38 pages long, and it took 10 pages for them to stop summarizing other people's work and get to the point of their paper (ugh). Therefore I'm writing this post instead.

I've noticed that I either need to take frequent breaks while working on the important stuff, or be talking to my friends online at the same time as I do it. I wish I could focus better on the important tasks and get them done faster.

I also have trouble dealing with errand-like business that pops up every now and then. For instance, I got my new computer almost 2 weeks ago, and I still haven't called the MatLab people and the Adobe people to switch over my key codes for use on my new PC. Like it's annoying and needs to be done, but it's not as important as the "annoying" schoolwork. Therefore it takes me forever to get around to it.

Then there's this whole new world of networking that I'm trying to get used to. My friends and family with more experience in this than me tell me to add people on Linked-In right after I meet them, but I do that and then the majority of them don't add me back. I don't get it! If I'm doing the "right thing," why don't they add me as contacts?

Anyway, I think a lot of my advisor's success comes from the fact that he gets up really early. He must get up at 4:30 every day at least, to start exercising at 5 am. He must get a lot done in the mornings before other people are awake and distract him.

Ok, so far I'm going to try doing the following things:

1. Wake up earlier and better. I don't wake up LATE per se, however I have the worst time getting out of bed in the morning. I can't tell you how many times I hit the snooze before actually getting up. Usually once too many, and then I'm late for class :/ But if I made an effort to actually wake up on time first, and then made an effort to wake up earlier in general, that would be useful.
2. Schedule time in each day for annoying errands.
3. Schedule time in each day for networking stuff.
4. Try doing important stuff first, at least getting it started before moving on to the "annoying" stuff.
5. Figure out how to focus better when working on important things.